This means:
1. no mega projects that attract similarly sized public opposition
2. 1-2 year construction timelines instead of 10+
3. much, much less financial and regulatory risk
4. if an individual project goes off the rails because of bad management, it just gets cancelled instead of being pushed forward with endless public dollars because of sunk cost fallacies
The private sector is well able to stomach the risk level of wind and solar and finance and build it on their own, whereas nuclear and mega hydro essentially require government financial backing, which again contributes to the agency problem.
We know we can build 1,000s of MW of wind and solar per year in a safe and cost-effective way because we're already doing that. Every single nuclear or dam project in North America right now is a delayed, over-budget financial and project management boondoggle.
Unlike coal or nuclear, renewables are easily scaled down without creating a huge risk: for coal, you want to go large for efficiency reasons and to ensure that the right set of filters are installed and maintained. For nuclear, there were ideas of building a nuclear power plant in every basement, but given how the power plants we have look like military bases, that seems rather unfeasible.
Once you go big, you have the issues mentioned elsewhere in the thread (sunk cost fallacy, NIMBY, ...) but also corruption and that these big sites become single points of failure.
Dams are in the same space: NIMBY, once started you can't stop, large scale construction (which is rife with corruption).
Create financially reasonable basement/rooftop level nuclear or coal systems that can be safely installed by any random electrician and operated by the home owner and the entire discussion may shift.
beacuse they stop working
They interfere with fish migration. For some species, this means disrupting their reproductive cycle.
They gradually accumulate sediment, so their reservoir slowly fills up and turns into land. This is one of the issues with the Aswan Dam, which is projected to have a much shorter lifespan than was initially projected due to high sediment accumulation.
The Aswan met all of its goals, but it's a disaster. The sediment rapidly accumulating behind the dam used to provide free fertilizer for farmers. Use of commercial fertilizer skyrocketed.
It's also the cause of a serious health crisis. Schistosomiasis cases have also skyrocketed.
The annual floods used to keep snail populations in check. The snails are the vector for this gruesome parasitic infection.
It makes absolutely no sense to start building nuclear now. Even if you could guarantee 10 year build time at a fixed cost today (which you can't), by the time it is operational solar+storage will be even more economical than it is today. The cost curves are simply too favorable for any private market to favor nuclear over solar currently. Everyone in this thread keeps talking about the technology, but it's purely about the economics. Solar+storage at grid-scale will be cheaper than basically all other forms of power generation within 5 years based on current cost curves. Within 10 years the cost of new solar+battery will be cheaper than the operational cost of nuclear, not even accounting for the billions in construction costs over decades.
If the billions spent on nuclear plants now was instantly diverted to solar, we'd have way more clean energy in the grid on a way shorter timeline. That's the reality today. It's time to stop arguing and stop wasting money. Nuclear is dead.
So basically one would need a lot of overcapacity to be able to produce and store enough power during the summer to last over the winter. But in places like California sure go full solar as it actually works all year around.
You realize this is like the US saying "lets give money to Mexico to build all of our solar power there (it is closer to the equator and thus would provide more even output throughout the year and would make more econimical sense) and just rely on them selling it to us forever at a nice price as they are a friendly country at this very moment". Or even better would be the countries further south and build a sea cable on international waters so anyone with a sub can go and cut it to fuck with you,
From a national security perspective relying on such a vital resource as electricity on someone else is just plain stupid. I realize most countries are in such a relationship with oil/gas countries at the very moment but I think the goal should be to lessen this kind of relationships not increase them.
I thought batteries just weren't there yet. Especially if you take wear cycles into account.
How much lithium is there, actually?
Imagine if the developed world invested in nuclear to the extent that France did in the 60s and 70s - how many trillions of tons of CO2 would NOT have been emitted into the atmosphere? You can talk about Republican denialism, but it is anti-nuke lobby that will be held responsible for climate change.
>by the time it is operational solar+storage will be even more economical than it is today.
Will it? Will the sun shine at night? when it's cloudy? No? Then it doesn't matter how cheap solar and wind are. You're not going to use either as a cornerstone of modern energy generation. So if not solar and wind, then what else is left? Germany knows - they are signing multi-decade deals for natural gas and coal-based power (from Russia and neighbors), as they are shutting down their nuclear plants.
I think OPs point is essentially that, even if nuclear would have helped in the 70s, it is now too late.
As for the intermittent issues of power. I think there's a lot to gain from long distance transportation combined with reliable output like hydro, existing nuclear, and perhaps later tidal.
No country will do it with nuclear in the future, because nuclear won't be competitive.
If we have a week of that weather Mad Max will be a become a documentary.
This is the solution, but currently only operating at a small scale. This is something that can be scaled up insanely quickly for a fraction the cost of alternatives. The success of this relatively small installation has already resulted in many more battery projects coming online this year.
This being my day job, it would add $8k to the electricity bill of the two child household in Australia if we used your solution to store the wind and solar power.
I ask because a 40C day sounds like a problem due to AC usage, but would probably come with pretty effective solar, and decent wind near the sea.
I get that. But it's worth going through the exercise how bad well-intentioned policies can be. It's worth to consider that anti-nuke activism is much worse than Conservative denialism.
And if nuclear is too late now, then there's nothing we can do to replace carbon-based power.
>I think there's a lot to gain from long distance transportation combined with reliable output like hydro, existing nuclear, and perhaps later tidal.
Oh come on. Hydro is great if you can get it. Places that can get hydro, already get hydro. Most places can't get hydro. Ditto for geothermal.
So what's the solution to replacing carbon emitting power sources? I want someone to explain that to me. Because all I hear is how solar and wind one day will be cheap and prices are falling every day - even though price is not the problem with solar and wind. Variability is. We need power when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining, and power requirements keep growing. People want electric cars and trains, those need huge amount of energy. I hear how batteries will save the day, except that we are not anywhere close to having battery technology capable of storing city-sized power requirements for a few minutes, much less hours or days. It may not even be physically possible to create a battery like that. So what's left? Coal and Gas - and this is exactly what EVERY nation is doing if they are not investing in (or divesting from) nuclear.
One should add wind and solar, both at around 0.5MJ/h per m2.
$/MWh is the only real metric that matters.
Edit: http://solarcellcentral.com/images/avg_cost_of_energy.jpg
Given this statement and the chart that shows solar and wind already being the cheapest energy sources this must mean we can just switch to solar and wind ... right?
Except we know we can't. We know that the variablity of solar and wind makes those impossible replacements for coal and gas. I guess price isn't the only metric that matters.
This is why the most important number is $/MWh for "solar/wind + storage". Storage has to be included in the equation. At current prices that puts "solar/wind + storage" about equal with natural gas, but those prices are dropping rapidly.
Installation times are also very significant factors in reaching emission reduction targets. Waiting 10+ years for nuclear to come online just isn't viable. Solar+storage can be operational at the same scale as a nuclear plant within 2-3 years.
Even if the US was totally committed, and decided to build a brand new reactor right now, how long would it take? A decade?
We can slap up renewables in a fraction of that time, and spend the next decade reaping the rewards, not sitting around waiting for the magical payoff of a reactor that will cost billions to build and operate, and doesn't do us a lick of good for an entire decade!
Totally committed? You sure? Ok.
The US could bring at least two dozen new nuclear power plants online per year. It could do that with only modest impact on its massive economy.
National security declaration (probably numerous). Bypass all environmental building concerns and impact reviews. Pull most of the US military out of Europe and all of it out of the Middle East. Mobilize at least 100,000 soldiers in support of the mission (ideally twice that number; clearing land, hauling materials, dealing with protestors, providing area security, restricting access including by drones). Whatever needs to be done, will be done. Redirect several agencies (DARPA, DOE, etc) to almost exclusively working on this mission for ten years. Have Congress declare a draft on the back of the national security declarations, pull relevant scientists and engineers out of the private economy via draft. Suspend all emigration. Federalize the control of all national guard troops, draft them all formally under the command of the US Military and remove them from their states to avoid potential state resistance (numerous states would attempt to resist this very strong-armed Federal plan). Nuclear plants would be reasonably distributed across the country, some states would attempt to resist any plants being built inside their borders, which is another reason you remove their national guard troops. This is serious, so we'll do what is necessary. It's life or death after all, right? If the Supreme Court attempts to block it, expand the size of the Supreme Court and stuff the bench until your votes win.
Use eminent domain where necessary. Limit taking private land as much as reasonably possible; doing so just gives the resistance groups an issue to play up. Fortunately in this case the Federal Government owns a ridiculous amount of land (particularly in the western states).
The US has an epic scale labor force, and millions of healthy people doing nothing that could be drafted into various basic positions in support of this large national project. Jobs! (there's that sound bite) Another plus: absolute secrecy would not be particularly paramount, unlike with the Manhattan Project. You wouldn't need a bunch of Oak Ridges. There isn't anything that special about a modern nuclear power plant, and the US wouldn't be using any radically new technology in these plants anyway.
Initially getting up to speed would take several years (standardizing and getting new workers enough experience, etc), after which you could get to a rate of bringing a new plant or two online in a given month.
Fund it with a trivial Federal Reserve Nuclear QE program. $20-$30 billion per month in 'printing.' The dollar wouldn't even notice, and it'd keep the budget from getting further stretched (which would keep the general population more calm than if you spiked their taxes or took from their social programs).
Task the major banks - all of which are realistically under direct supervisory control of the Federal Reserve and Treasury these days - with helping to keep the US financial system stable (there might initially be some panic), including where interest rates are concerned. The US has the most powerful banking and financial system by a considerable margin, it would be told to accomodate and assist, or else (look what they did for funding the shale build-out, a spigot of hundreds of billions of dollars; private loans involved in the program would largely be back-stopped by the Fed; thousands of companies in the private economy would need loans to ramp up early on; the banks making some money on this would remove a potential resistance point). Put the talking heads on TV to work pushing the agenda favorably, to calm the population; spin how positive this will be for the economy, jobs jobs jobs (just keep repeating that). Do the exact same thing for the business & financial media to soothe Wall Street, talk up how good it'll be for corporate profits, manufacturing, construction, et al. Throw billions of printed magic dollars at the military industrial complex and their partners, to remove (bribe) a potential adversary to the plan. There's a line for everyone: jobs, green, do it for the children, manufacturing & blue collar, energy independence, tell them how great it will make America, etc.
By necessity we'd build and improve a lot of grid along the way as well. There would be several hundred billion dollars spent on that over more than a decade.
15-20 total years for the program (a dozen or so prime building years in there, during which most of the plants would come online). Once the early years of hard work of ramping up, standardizing and getting it all rolling was done, you could relax some of the initial political policies that it took to get underway. The program would also include a considerable investment into the aging 60 plant fleet the US has now. In the end, this would wipe out most of the US fossil fuel economy. It would cost several trillion 2019 dollars, spread out over two decades. The ~20 year program span would give us time to gradually retrain labor away from the fossil fuel economy. As the plants are brought online, you'd start by eliminating existing coal plants and coal jobs first (there aren't actually that many workers in coal these days anyway), with the displaced workers getting jobs and job training to participate in the new nuclear power economy.
How committed do you want to get? How dire is the situation?
If the fate of the world is in question then Ted Kaczynski is a rational individual who reacted with restraint.
For now, space is just a good training ground. It is not necessary to build isolated eco systems / livable environments on earth and doing so makes no sense financially. Space enthusiasm is a good tool to push R&D.
On an even longer scale it would certainly provide a diverse range of evolutionary benefits, but that would probably go a far bit off topic.
There is limited global capacity to do the very heavy forgings required for reactor pressure vessels (and no capacity at all for that in the US).
Renewable energy at that scale is still theoretical and hasn't shown its downsides yet.
Nuclear has shown all its downsides, and they have been 95% corrected. It's a mature, known technology.
As for plant capacity, the largest power plant in the world is renewable (Hydropower):22.5 GW. Compare that with the largest nuclear plant, the Kashiwazaki Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant (currently closed due to safety concerns): 8GW.
If you limit "renewables" to only solar and wind, there are already 1GW+ wind and solar PV projects operating, and more in the planning and construction phase. There's no theoretical obstacle to building 8GW solar PV projects, though it might be unnecessary, as they can be deployed in a modular fashion. There are several 500MW solar thermal projects operating and more planned.
The downsides of nuclear are not comprehensively understood. The consequences of the Fukushima Daichi nuclear disaster of 2011 may be with us for decades or centuries. The interactions between radioactive material, the atmosphere, the ocean, the human body, and other organic matter, are complex.
Hydro works well and is the best solution if our country has capacity for it, unfortunately, it's not available everywhere.
> The downsides of nuclear are not comprehensively understood. The consequences of Fukushima may be with us for decades or centuries. The interactions between radioactive material, the atmosphere, the ocean, the human body, and other organic matter, are complex.
The downsides are completely understood and the consequences of Fukushima (please specify in your message the nuclear plant) are well studied, the result is that there's not much impact.
Hydropower is also an example of one of my points. It is a mature technology, and we now know of its big environmental costs as well as it's benefits. We could technically probably double the hydroelectric power of the world, but the natural devastation would be too large, so we mostly chose not to.
We have yet to see what those downside are for solar and wind. For nuclear we know, and also know how to handle them.
It's already hard to find a safe solution for waste that'll survive for millennia. Simply because predicting what might happen over those time scales is hard.
Now factor in that it'll be paid for by humans with a lifespan left of 50 years, and usually a decision horizon of 4 years (i.e. politicians).
The chances off getting it wrong technically are non zero. The chances of getting it wrong for budgetary reasons are even bigger. Incentives do not line up.
Solar and wind are plenty cheap. That's not their problem. The problem, as the article stated, is that "they are not available around the clock, rain or shine, and batteries that could power entire cities for days or weeks show no sign of materializing any time soon."
So now what do you do?
This is simply untrue.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/pges-recording-...
The batteries have already materialized, and once they start installations at scale this will be taking over the energy market. This makes solar/wind viable as a base load power source virtually everywhere in the world. Even in places that get heavy cloud cover such as Northern Europe will start using these solutions at scale within the next few years.
No. That's the entire problem. There are no batteries that can scale to city needs.
What you're citing is a completely different use case. There is very good case to be made that battery farms can replace gas-burning power ONLY when they are used as a way to quickly scale power production. Battery farms also make sense to even out supply and demand (i.e. serve as a place to dump excess power, or provide stored energy when supply temporarily drops).
ALL new battery projects are around those two use cases. And that's great!! It isn't nothing, and it's a great technology solution for a very real need.
HOWEVER, it's one thing for a battery farm to supply power for seconds or minutes in specific cases, it's another for a battery farm to provide hours or days of constant supply ... every day. Not only is it expensive because you need to over-provision your generation and storage capacity (i.e. in order to provide power for 1 hour at night, you actually need solar to produce 1.5-2 hours of surplus energy). Worse, because wind/solar power generation output is affected by seasons, you'll actually have to over-provision just to match peak seasonal output, meaning that in-season, you invested in infrastructure that's sitting around doing nothing. Then there are also major durability issues. Current battery tech is simply not durable enough and will never be durable enough to solely backup wind and solar in a cost effective way. We're talking about batteries needing to operate for days and weeks when wind and solar output dips (or drops to nothing) at huge scale.
This article goes into some details:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611683/the-25-trillion-re...
This is why no nation is actually replacing any nuclear or fossil-fuel-based power with SOLELY wind/solar+battery solution.
There are other issues that are typically glossed over, such as the fact that solar, wind and battery tech are typically environmentally destructive to make (requiring mining, and complex refining processes), and are very hard and expensive to recycle.
It's possible that some battery-tech breakthrough occurs and changes this (and the article references tech like using surplus power to create molten-salt to use as a storage medium), but the reality is that today, we don't have the technology that is anywhere close to cost-effective, and it isn't clear if there will be one in the next X years.
Design cities for pedestrians, bicycles and public transit. This will help reduce heat island effect, thereby reducing the need for AC.
I slept in a tent for nearly six years. I plugged in at the library during the day. I got by on battery power in the evening until I fell asleep.
I'm currently in a hundred year old building with radiant heat and no AC. It has good design that helps keep the building comfortable without a lot of modern amenities we think are required.
I spend a lot of time online. I don't own a TV.
You can have a very modern life on a lot less electricity than many people use.
It's really not a given that we must use high levels of electricity to maintain a high quality of life. The first thing we should do is question such assumptions. The second is start actively challenging them.
This is a problem rooted in culture more than technology.
Igloos:
On the outside, temperatures may be as low as −45 °C (−49 °F), but on the inside the temperature may range from −7 °C (19 °F) to 16 °C (61 °F) when warmed by body heat alone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igloo
I can't readily find a source with details, but traditional desert cities were located on high ground and the streets oriented to catch the winds such that daytime street temperatures were pleasant.
We used to design buildings and cityscapes to work with the local climate. Now, we slap up cardboard boxes, inject insulation and add HVAC systems, counting on technology to keep things comfortable in place of good design. In reality, well designed buildings are more comfortable and probably less likely to suffer from sick building syndrome.
this is just an intellectual dishonest excuse to ignore nuclear energy
I'm an environmental studies major whose dream job would be urban planning or similar. I've been looking for real solutions to such problems for a lot of years.
One conclusion I've drawn is that passive solar really needs a lot more attention than it gets. It's an elegant solution with no real downside.
Nuclear has a couple of big downsides. 1. When things go wrong, it's really bad, a la Chernobyl. 2. Even if nothing goes wrong, safely storing the spent fuel is a significant issue and goes on "forevy."
Everyone knows about those two issues. It's precisely why nuclear is controversial.
It's also possible for someone to be pro nuclear power and also pro conservation. There is no need to set this up as an either-or thing. People could be pro passive solar while being pro nuclear power.
I'm not pro nuclear power. I'm also not strongly against it. I'm just trying to let people know that passive solar exists and can play a role in solving these issues.
Let me get this straight, The only way to curb emissions is to severely reduce our energy use?
>This is a problem rooted in culture more than technology.
No. This is a problem of people not wanting a subsistence-based lifestyle. Your suggested policies are insane. They are not reasonable, at all. You're talking about replacing all roads and buildings (and cities)? Use non-existent battery technology to power a modern economy?
Internalize the fact that power requirements will keep growing and that expecting people to live in tents is not a reasonable policy.
Proponents of nuclear tend to ignore the long-run costs associated with nuclear (eg. waste transport and storage), and the potential for cost blowouts due to acute disasters like Fukushima (estimated cost to taxpayers: USD $100 Billion).
The fact tax money is going towards Fukushima highlights another problem with nuclear power: the agency problem. The individuals and organizations that planned and built Fukushima are not directly shouldering the full cost of the problem it created. You can extrapolate from this to many other problems and risks associated with nuclear power, because the timeframe is long relative to the life of a human. If the average human lifespan was 200 years or more, maybe this would be less of an issue, but as it is now, profits now will inevitably trump responsibility tomorrow (and by tomorrow, I mean 30+ years from now).
There's also the risk of weaponization, which increases as the number of plants increase, particularly if those plants are built in countries which currently do not possess much technical nous. It's not a technology that should be disseminated, because the risks are real, and catastrophic in their consequences. If this sounds paranoid, Warren Buffett had this to say about the threat of cyber, biological, nuclear, or chemical attack on in the US:
"“What’s a small probability in a short period approaches certainty in the longer run. (If there is only one chance in thirty of an event occurring in a given year, the likelihood of it occurring at least once in a century is 96.6%.) The added bad news is that there will forever be people and organizations and perhaps even nations that would like to inflict maximum damage on our country. Their means of doing so have increased exponentially during my lifetime. “Innovation” has its dark side.
There is no way for American corporations or their investors to shed this risk. If an event occurs in the U.S. that leads to mass devastation, the value of all equity investments will almost certainly be decimated.
No one knows what “the day after” will look like. I think, however, that Einstein’s 1949 appraisal remains apt: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”"
[Source: 2016 annual letter to Berkshire shareholders]